Yes yes yes my friends it’s time again to celebrate the
anniversary of the birth (October 23, 1927) of Philip Lamantia, the late
great San Francisco poet (he died in 2005) and this year –
– I’m throwing a stellar party for Philip: laid out below are the 145 (yow!) instances in which “star” or “stars” (or variants such as example “starlight”) appear in Lamantia’s Collected Poems.
It would take a concordance to know for sure (and I dream that some day there will be one!), but my best guess is that “star” / “stars” and variants are most certainly among Lamantia’s most frequently used nouns, and they may well top the list of such words (and yes, I know I’ve included some adjectives below). The reason why “star” / “stars” and variants are so common in Lamantia’s poetry is worth a celestial reverie or three, or probably, if I may borrow a phrase, billions and billions of such thoughts. So focus your imagination’s Hubble-scope, channel your inner Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and constellate a theory, will you please?
For the moment, I’ll simply observe that while Lamantia’s poems date from 1943 to about 2001, his many uses of “star” / “stars” and variants do not seem dated today at all. Indeed, it might perhaps be said that Lamantia’s star-filled poems were ahead of their time – or should I say their space-time continuum – given the current and most welcome ascendancy of “dark-sky reserves” where we might more fully enjoy the “cosmic energy engines” or “luminous sphere[s] of plasma” which populate the universe.
In any event, my fellow earth-dwellers, I hope you find the following excerpts a most scintillating intergalactic poetic trip! Happy Lamantia Day star-gazing to all (please note, I’ve excerpted as many or as few lines from each poem as I thought necessary or fun, bolded each instance of “star” / “stars” and variants, and tried to preserve the formatting of the lines), and here we go:
For the moment, I’ll simply observe that while Lamantia’s poems date from 1943 to about 2001, his many uses of “star” / “stars” and variants do not seem dated today at all. Indeed, it might perhaps be said that Lamantia’s star-filled poems were ahead of their time – or should I say their space-time continuum – given the current and most welcome ascendancy of “dark-sky reserves” where we might more fully enjoy the “cosmic energy engines” or “luminous sphere[s] of plasma” which populate the universe.
In any event, my fellow earth-dwellers, I hope you find the following excerpts a most scintillating intergalactic poetic trip! Happy Lamantia Day star-gazing to all (please note, I’ve excerpted as many or as few lines from each poem as I thought necessary or fun, bolded each instance of “star” / “stars” and variants, and tried to preserve the formatting of the lines), and here we go:
. . . leaving behind a limpid song
heard by a million murdered stars.
– The Ruins
O the mirror-like dirt
of freshly spilt blood
trickling down the walls
the walls that reach the stars!
– Automatic World
and with our mouths opened for the stars
howling for the castles to melt at our feet
you and I
will ride . . .
– Hermetic Bird
The naked lovers! All of them, fifteen years old! One can still see their hair
growing! They come from the mountains, from the stars even, with their handsome
eyes of stone.
– A Civil World
Neurasthenics
with young blood
ride to the stars
with horses from Peru
– The Enormous Window
The stars are wet tonight
the naked schoolmasters
are no longer in the gardens of childhood
and the sea has been heated for lions
– The Enormous Window
Your body reclaiming the stars
lifts itself in a wooden frame
to be seen in boulevards
that twist themselves at dawn into my room
– Mirror and Heart
Butterflies have come to rest upon your lips
Whose words clothe the dancing stars
Falling lightly to earth.
– Awakened From Sleep
We have been carried here against our will
Burnt stars
Oceanic gardens
where the clouds are soaked into my eyes
– Celestial Estrangement
just as no one has the right to understand
why you were born in a house of cigarettes
or I in a howling star
– You and I Have Nothing to Fear
Rest assured
we have not been uttering a word
against the master
His leafy ears heal too quickly
and besides the stars have crossed over
our tight embrace
– You and I Have Nothing to Fear
To You Henry Miller of the Orchestra the Mirror
the Revolver and of the Stars of Stars
– [poem title]
You flee into a corridor of stars.
You sleep in a bleeding tree,
And awaken upon the body of trance.
– [You flee into a corridor of stars]
Your mask disappears in the sky
Leaving the veined star open
For my kisses. Your star, above
Pain’s phantom touch, slowly entering
The net of my arms to sleep again
In the rib’s infinite eye.
– Nativity of Love
This love’s knowing silence
Flows toward divinity;
Is a finger of light
Upon grains of sand:
Our golden stars of infinity.
– Autumn Poems
I am forlorn.
The berry under the breast
Breaks its sea of sorrow over my head.
Resting on stone, I think of my unending quest
For the morning star gone.
– [I am forlorn]
As I watch him, I wonder what alien wind
Drove the savage tooth, as a sea,
To his body’s star:
– Sorrow
We walk arm in arm in the country,
With stars and grains of sand
Gathered for apt communion.
– Night Vision
Unable to move and hardly breathing,
I am before the stars’ alchemy of light
And eternal marvel of blue of sky into darkness,
Becoming balm to my blood’s long agony
Of we two wrested from each other
In these dreaded days
And unholy divisions of our love.
– [Unable to move and hardly breathing]
Not unlike, I imagine, Adam
Before the Fall, a man in coition,
Rousing great power out of dust and clay,
With the first star of night
Brightly in his loin, is carried upward,
And knows the wordless speech
From a quick rush of water,
Transformed among pebbles and rocks,
And through the toneful wind
In a darkened forest of moving trees.
– Symbols
I remember the day fused with the night
In the dawn of a moment’s eternity,
And hearing your voice from beyond the starry wall,
I know what we knew together is the way,
Now and even when the seasons are no more.
– Another Autumn Coming
At the crossing of the winds,
under the morning star, the rose
plumed and the violet plumed, fly out
returning the treasures while the Spring Wheel
turns in the blossoming flowering.
– Revelations of a New Order
Ashes, like stars, fall into the sewers.
A bird, hatched no longer than a second,
Falls from its nest
Fated for no other wings than death.
– Break of Day
And this was my dream that lasted from some dawn to some midnight in the
fallingdown room overlooking the oldest graveyard of Manhattan:
the poisonous stars: benign
the rootless tree: nailed to the sky
the black pit: enclosing ladders of white light
the icebergs of the mind: floating to the tropics . . .
– Inside the Journey
Fire
Crackles beneath and above:
Watergrown
stars overoute the wordtide.
– [Ground grade guard the crucible]
On a smiling crevice of street,
He cuts, for death, the diamond of her eye:
Star plumed hands put it
Burning on his brow.
– [In a garden that isn’t, but will be]
They curve, craned in a surging stream,
Until spasmodic rungs flame to leap
Toward a deathbed star
Of the spherical deep: they rise,
Drop, love, bird/ript in a highted dream.
– [In a garden that isn’t, but will be]
A tongue grew tongueless:
The breath, a wail of stars
And black sky: a flying milk—
– [Flame gates open to water gongs]
And the madmonths whirled
To never-die-alone,
And alone they died in a lie
Of the wildbleet sound of starry truth.
– To the Music
To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar
to MarMagAgog, onto sidereal semaphores,
to leech/hung prayer fields of Avadon
to Triptika on the sunbelted Nile
where fish is god
to stars unravelling the numena/number
snaked in iceflames of Baruda
whirler of the wild,
to Smarachet . . .
– [To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar]
O rocket me,
He who is mine is I
and wins the Sky:
A Sun & Moon ago, kissed to stars,
a momentary string of sands to go,
arriving on the silent sea roar.
– [To the flat lands by the hills of Suum Nar]
Glory crasht on time
and burden of the stars
elliptical HEARTS convex
– Christ
three magi on the road
and star wheels to
B E T H L E H E M
– Christ
I’ve killed them, stars and chains of lust
before magi, magi, magi,
Cavalcanti on the stairs
La beauté
– Les Langueurs Allongées
the trouble with the stars is
they’re too far from my eyes to yours
– Sheri
I am smoked to dryness
Stars of smoke who made this road throw up
your eyes
which are closed in New York
– Ball
by the sun from the page I wait
as long
as a star
– Ball
Winds have not flown longer than time we stopped
Whose sail hit the rooms where you looked into voids
—A beast on a star, Jaiba on the moon, the sunken tooth—
Stalks of madness tripled fire
And sent gardens under the sea
– Dead Smoke
The stars have gone over the mountain
Meridians later your smile broke glass
– Deirdre
As some light fell
on the inescaped facade
stains of interior cancer
intervined the stars
– [As some light fell]
For it is all blest by God
water, earth, stars, souls
which is to say, all is blessed IN God
and what is not, is not
for God is that WHICH IS
– The Poor Paradoxes
Last night Mike told me he believed the stars are alive
Today we walk with the yellow haired child
– Boobus
The morning is burnt with smells of cooking and cooked stars
It’s nirvana!
– Boobus
Come lion - come tiger - come ocelet
come coon - come weed - come leopard
come saliva - come STARS
– McClure’s Favorite
It’s zenith!
zodiacal beasts phospher
and stars devoured white!
– Observatory
No longer the razor from a sheath of stars
over the face of day
come back from night
– Intersection
It’s useless to ask who’s behind these eyes
set like stars in snow
or name the creatures coming alive
out of the exploding iris
– Intersection
My coat covered the stars
the bird gave me a cap of hair
– [It was a time I didn’t see the beast]
goats, gangrene and The Stars
– Binoculars [Michael McClure]
Who is the star dancer the turn the glide speed the changes
– Binoculars [John Hoffman]
All night long, aztec messengers arrived
and fell stars!
All night long, end of time
jaguar in her eye
– Memoria
Can I make it to windows of fur?
Can I soup up her eyes in a can of star milk and shoot it for light?
– Füd at Foster’s
These are not poems I wanted to make
Ones I wanted to didn’t come out
They’re stuck in star thief land
– Immediate Life
they call to me, holy fires
holy fires to send me forth out of Loon
holy fires behind stars
numena cabalas of Fiery Disk
– Orphic Poem
as we wove thru street’s half light, a junky
leaned his arm on the stars of my sleeve
– Politics Poem
GONG OF THE WORLD OF SENSE / GONG OF EQUILIBRAL
STARS.
– Last Days of San Francisco
EARTH / STAR
– Last Days of San Francisco
Together we watched for ten thousand years
— the first five an age of monsters
and I laid open to the plumage of the stars
magnetic wands and gourds fell upward in a dance
that shook the lice of the ages!
– Time Is as Eternity Is: On the White Road: The Muse
. . . if the stars were colors of her eyes
– [Shooting down to L.A. in an open car]
Rosa Mystica! Holy Woman lighted by afternoons
in the temple
Woman lit with the sun, crowned by stars
Womb of universes turning over in her eyes
– The Juggler in the Desert
that doesn’t stop my cry your hurt
your death these stars upset
in the circumnavigations of the bed
– [in every way i am dazzled by you]
Ah the communion of spirits talking
vegetables, singing stars,
cruel gods gored my loves
– Jet Powered Suicide
Is NOT. And not— it’s ended,
as star
watcher
skyred.
– Jet Powered Suicide
My friend, you sing songs of burden
I’m singing of the silence of saliva, streets, stars
the invading of angels
at the moment of a singular embrace
for all time given
to set us free among the beautiful limits
– My Labyrinth
it’s everywhere
in this passage of assaults
PRESENCE of a new star opened in my throat’s wisdom
Child! Hope! looking for the key in the roar of mazes
FOUND
– My Labyrinth
Take a shell of cotton
move a river south
exact a city with rain
paint a sign with stars.
Little do we know.
– [Why write about “things”?]
. . . after getting lost unable
to find the steps down a million stars blacked
out by Mantle Night . . .
– Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene)
hoping we’d find the stone stairway
and there were few stars to illuminate us down
– Ceylonese Tea Candor (Pyramid Scene)
for fifteen minutes outside in the night I SAW THE LIGHT BEHIND THE
STARS
LIGHT THE DARK
AND MY EYES WERE FULL OF IT!
– Crystals
it’s the moment interruption of hallucinated stars
now fallen down in my room with poetry
falling with lights of shimmering brains . . .
– Kosmos
They come with a scratching star
with a mugwort of madmanes of the Head
that point all the faces of the Beast at once appear!
– Year of Weir
Beast of mudajangi
the Lord of Youth
his head the spindle of stars
– Year of Weir
and a thousand bird cries fallen diagonally from the stars
return to batú bató the stars are calling
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 10)
inside the earth by the arrows of your quivering breath, poet
penetrate the fins of the sand star out of the mist to the house of the sand star
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 18)
Last night I walked on 9th Avenue and the moon was my guide
The stars guided you Christopher Columbus
And I talked for hours about Spain
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 20)
Not the sublime among these baroque enscrollations
but a thousand angelfaces, star tilted eyes
out of sweating, sun baked bodies burning me
conducting me to silences
and mend my heart to God’s—
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 22)
I came throwing shells and beasts godfathered
for suns moons and zodiacal stars
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 33)
her head’s foot spades my head
stringing stars . . .
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 33)
. . . in Hades
a star thief found it
and sold it in Siam.
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 35)
Through a village suspended like a star of blood
going into the rites of the old men
silence invaded me . . .
– Destroyed Works Typescript (# 36)
I’m Osiris hunting stars his black tail of the sun!
– [old after midnight spasm]
Every time I smoke a cigarette the Creator has blinked all stars time pebbles of
water in a trillion second of man’s sodomite existence my words can not lie!
– [Immense black void . . .]
black star of Amapola
– [In camera of sempiternity . . .]
seers shift in stars Amapola in clutches of white lice
– [In camera of sempiternity . . .]
spilled on swords of history Morgenroth I carve yr face by starspilled mariahs
– This World’s Beauty
I keep stoning you with black stars
– Resurrections [It is I who create the world]
I think a star in monster’s mouth
Incisions of frosted flowers take up on its lake
its clouds turn into iron hooks
its oceanic tower turns in yr entrails
– Fin del Mundo [At the sleeper of inveterate cars]
Lost in a crowd, the mark on his forehead untouched, his cat fell out of the
clouds. For this police gyrated to him. I make it on the poem he said. The room he
slept in turned into a star. Down he went against the magnetism of the Flush!
– The Apocalyptic [Lost in a crowd]
I’ve come to the time of brain crashed stars diadems of implacable women turn
in sewers of Los Angeles. My corner of meat is a necklace of guts, Oh bug of eternal
recurrence!
– The Apocalyptic [I’ve come to the time]
. . . Gabagava and the rest of doomed bones of starshit.
– The Apocalptic [I’ve come to the time]
Who giveth birth to the Morning Star, Here’s the quiet cry of stars broken among
crockery
– Morning Light Song
O beato solitudo! where have I flown to?
stars overturn the wall of my music
as flight of birds, they go by, the spirits
opened below the lark of plenty
– High
Cups the legends reveal & the ancients
are beginning to pass around as if they were ordinary
milk bottles for the children newly born from
top branches of the Tree with its roots
going back
to the starfields of Every Night.
– The Ancients Have Returned Among Us
the youth’s vision
is a vibrant string plucked by the gods
over the field of stars
– She Speaks the Morning’s Filigree
Over & over the dusk of the Chant from the plain of Segovia
rings up the veil through which the deities move prisms of desire :
the cup that swallows the sword, the wands that shake the stars !
– She Speaks the Morning’s Filigree
Epiphany
in a starspangled leather jacket
– What Is Not Strange?
The stars have gone crazy
and the moon is very angry
The old civilization
that rolled the dice of Hitler
is surely bumbling
into a heap of catatonic hysteria
– Astro-mancy
Another civilization
secret for six thousand years
is creeping on the crest of
future, I can almost see the
tip of its triangular star
– Astro-mancy
What, then, is coming to be
from undergrounds too fast
in their bright plumages
flailing our brains
with the gash of birth ?
Something storing mercurial islets
and fungi of being . . .
and sold for altars
pitched to the stars !
– After the Virus
I would marry all the stars sitting on the face of the sea
like a traditional wolf of the absolute
sucking down the dish served up by the flood !
– Coat of Arms
the forest before me
replaced
by a cartilage of stars?
– Coat of Arms
and only the starlight consoles.
– Difficult First Steps
prayer is constant Magick, the single beam
coming from the Sky Crown: the sure stairway
that writes the stars as the Scales measure
what you see, how you stroke cats or when the time IS
to cross bridges between earth & air . . .
– Without Props
to the schisms
of star & seed
– Thorn of the Air
The green eye on my coat
loots the sun’s paradise of green eyes
star caught in throat is a green eye
– Interjections
It is you, Christian Rosencruetz
in the surrealist star that cries with sphinx’s bluefeet
triple dogmatism of apocalyptic night
the Rosicrucian horseman is butchered by Knowing Skulls of Mount Atlas
– Interjections
Like the fond palm leaves of my childhood
That broke from my breast of stars
– [San Francisco melts as I come together]
Manikins come alive
Their livers suckable as plums and raging stars
– [The maginot line of poetry has not been invented]
I can watch the children climbing the diamond temples at every corner
And there’s a taste of bituminous wine
For the solar incubation so rarely conjured
But for your hair shedding the stars
– Ephemeris
I comb the stars
And they undress the moon with their nipples
– Out of My Hat of Shoals
Your feet spread like vibrant chords over rustling plastic dolls
Bleeding american flags planted into your eyes knit with nazi stars
Leather brassieres wave through the universal televisions
– [The mosque of your eye has exploded]
Pea brain is the star’s octopus sucker or is not to be
disturbed . . .
– Tonight Burned with Solar Slime
for the likes of the adepts
who smile through the velvet fissures of the centuries
that are Waves & Blankets of Stars
under which we are given, if we burrow long enough
for the hidden script, the Key to the King’s Shut Chamber
– The Adept
Suck the bark to your star’s ease that illumines One, the cavern above the storm
Two, the desire which is desired, and Three phases from virginal to torture.
– World without End
I can barely see you mixed up to be chopped like so many valentine hearts by the fierce
blades that I roll out of the black star!
– World without End
Here heady garbage glitters
through the sand its own perfection
between minute star-specks
and the infinite calling the grains . . .
– [Flying beasts]
Not only the Star Woman luminous within convulsions at the apex of your
cascading dress
– Luminous Lady
The look of haunted beasts
Slaughtered long ago through crystal flakes
Shimmers from the imaginal tropic
To a star field of birds
Whose cries paint the sonorous language
– Redwood Highway
Sleep-
Flaking
To the hinterland
In a circle bound by shooting stars
Ears beneath the sands of sable dreams
– Redwood Highway
Nearing sleep, this same wind rustles the void of bloodstained horses (my first cabals) whose galaxy dissolves with a kiss the victorious rescue of the palpable shadow streaming stars, her face: this bed, the undulant phantom: her hips.
– Primavera
The stars dress up their furrows
– Becoming Visible
Violet Star
– [poem title]
between a star’s gleaming shadow
and its great coat of morning stilts
thrown on a grave like a glove of drenched eyeballs
there is a splinter of green dust
luminously taking off for the hurried horizon
– Precipitous Oracle
My foot in the hair of spinning stars
– Life Sciences
In my hand cupping sun assassins
lines of mercury and unknown stars
pure poetry of Pomo night
– Willow Wand
Perishing star systems Enough of a raid on the tsetse-fly
– Invincible Birth
standing like a star over the slaughter house
– Black Window
Star War syndromes hang like purple flowers . . .
– Black Window
the lugubrious pianos dim out the song of star wars
– The Romantist
She’s in their mouths
a house like a pyramid
built with rectangulars
perfect pear of a diagonal
down to the stars picked from photic jargon
The hand that writes is worth an empire on the moon
– Virgo Noir
They say there’s a world outside me but I know better
Enlightenment in the kali yuga is a daily recurrence
shubahdu it’s over taking a long trip to the stars
– Virgo Noir
‘Move the prisms north
the south direction is not propitious
follow the star . . . ’
– The Mysteries of Writing in the West
the card of Blazing Star in the slow drawers of the Far West
– Exorcist Exercises
the sheep have lunged from their star paths over Alhambra . . .
– Other States
to catch the ring of stars
at the still point
of infinite sur-rational flight
– There
In the alchemical legends, there’s a certain star seen at the completion of the Work, appears on the silver horizon through the trail in the grove.
– Shasta
There are none there— but stars
– Haiku for Satie
Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape
– [poem title]
Yet, this city’s night is marvelous when there’s a general electric breakdown
The stars come down to us, I see Orion’s belt close up in the eastern sky
With three-quarter waning moon
– Once in a Lifetime Starry Scape
. . . We are hidden by stars and tars of this time
– Poem for André Breton
. . . Revolution the Star in the West springs the play of foam on the
rocks below. . . .
– Ex Cathedra
The star card bestows the charm of new rivers, this word tomorrow, Andromeda,
and with you, Amor.
– Ex Cathedra
. . . The starry sky, Pluto’s mirror . . .
– Unachieved
In my dream, the Goddess in her heavenly palace on the earth
a kind of Marienbad in lunar light
She in her silver gown slightly décolleté
has me watch the Stellar Mirror
while stars of the Pleiades run in a rhythm of Eight
and do an astral dance, tout court
– Unachieved
The great crystal pool Starry Night breaks into caves
– Diana Green
. . . this Ohlonian Spring of
superfinches I love more than to become a star
– Passionate Ornithology Is Another Kind of Yoga
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